


Mr Bennet, Accidental Time Traveller

by CynicInAFishbowl



Category: Pride and Prejudice & Related Fandoms, Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: Gen, Tumblr made me do it, Unashamed crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 07:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12030879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynicInAFishbowl/pseuds/CynicInAFishbowl
Summary: Reginald Bennet finds himself, through only some fault of his own, transported to late Georgian/early Regency England, and is unimpressed.From the prompt:Mr. Bennet, accidental time-traveler, who, after mucking up his doctoral thesis or some kind of experiment, finds himself transported back to Regency England and HATES IT SO MUCH.





	Mr Bennet, Accidental Time Traveller

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AMarguerite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/gifts).



> AMarguerite, marvellous woman that she is, was [having a rant about how much she hated _Lost in Austen_](http://amarguerite.tumblr.com/post/165091478118/dlasta-re-lost-in-austen-ooooh-my-god-i), which, honestly, #same, and at the end, she mentioned that the time travel fic that she'd actually like to read would be about accidental time traveller Mr Bennet.
> 
> Which gave me the ideas.
> 
> I then wrote the ideas. 
> 
> You can find her thoughts on how it might happen on [her blog](http://amarguerite.tumblr.com/post/165102887308/might-you-be-persuaded-to-write-the-mr-bennet-time).
> 
> You're going to see some characters from my Politics and Profanity universe, but they are not the same people. It's just that when I want a slightly irritating member of the aristocracy who would be doing a PhD in theoretical physics just to freak out his parents, my mind defaults to everyone's favourite peer of the realm, Lord Tristan.

It started, as things often do,  with a number of exceedingly drunk university students having a heated argument about their areas of research and the concomitant theories.

After staying up all night to watch the moon landing, drinking every time a newsreader explained something which was blatantly obvious in the minds of the increasingly tipsy theoretical physics PhD candidates crowding around the television set in the common room of Magdalen College, Oxford, as tended to be the case when a grouping of egotistical geniuses were in each other's company long enough, they ran out of conversational fodder and set to the most important facet of professional academia - discrediting the work of other academics. Or in this case, one's peer group of prospective academics.

Like every other time the two of them were in a room together, Tristan Fitzwilliam (OE, BS (Hons) Cantab, Oxon), the Viscount ----, who was engaged in postgraduate study much to the disappointment and mounting alarm of his father,  the Earl of ----, and Reginald Bennet (State educated, BS (Hons) UCL, Oxon), son of Reginald Bennet, coal miner, and mild to middling Trot, were at each other's throats. At least this time it appeared that they were keeping it strictly verbal. There hadn't been any fisticuffs since that incident involving the chair through the window and the never conclusively proven to be connected escape of half of the rabbits held in the biology lab adjacent to their research area, but that wasn't to say that it wouldn't eventually come to that. It wouldn't be, as explained in the previous sentence, the first time.

The argument was, as usual, related to their opposing fields of research. Fitzwilliam held that under the correct circumstances (physicist speak for "totally impossible, not in a million years, sonny-jim, entirely not even possibly physically achievable on earth") a wormhole through the space-time continuum could be opened whereby a person, item,  or other such sundry could be transported, unharmed, to another time and place. How to determine that time and place was immaterial, and how to get them back irrelevant, because such a thing could not be achieved in reality. There was a reason the field was called "theoretical" physics. Bennet to this said fie. No massaging of the conditions, no matter how innovative and imaginative (and theoretical physicists massaging conditions in order to make theoretically possible the clearly unworkable could do just about anything if they tinkered hard enough with reality) could result in such an event.

One thing, as with irritable researchers facing someone who said that their research was codswallop tended to be the case, led to another, and as one might with a recalcitrant member of the elderly who refused to try to operate a television set, Fitzwilliam began walking Bennet through the process whereby (positing a number of caveats along the way - the usual ones like a lightless vacuum where no gravity exists) such a thing could happen, in an attempt to make the chap see sense. Bennet, with very poor grace, allowed himself to be shown with no qualms, as if he was right, nothing was going to happen, and if Fitzwilliam was right, which he clearly wasn't, because the whole theory was horseshit, then something might happen were he in the magical theoretical universe Fitzwilliam had built himself, but nothing was going to happen to him on earth at that time. 

Only it turned out that they were both wrong. Because not only was it theoretically possible, it was quite practically practicable. As the two of them discovered when, after a lengthy explanation of which planets of the solar system had to be deleted from existence in order to make the theory work, Bennet was zapped by the van de Graff generator that Fitzwilliam had pulled from nowhere in order to demonstrate how an electrical charge (in a lightless, gravity-free vacuum where no matter capable of creating such a charge existed) could set in motion the formation of the wormhole (not strictly necessary to the demonstration, but whether he did it simply because he wanted to zap the chap was neither here nor there), when Reg Bennet was suddenly neither here nor there.

This was problematic for both of them. On the part of the actor, he had just proven time travel to be entirely possible and actually rather easy to achieve, but had simultaneously banished another fellow of the institution to he knew not where or when, and he had no way of getting that back, and surely that constituted rather greivous academic misconduct. He also couldn't rule out it being illegal. On the part of the acted upon, he had been shown to be entirely wrong by a colleague whom he rather disliked, and he appeared to have been dumped somewhere which clearly wasn't Oxford, in a time which, given the stench of no public sanitation, the proliferation of horse carts lining the roadway, and the tendency towards knee-length coats and curly wigs for the men, and false rumps for the women, seemed to be some time around 1785 or so, with no immediately evident means of return. And he didn't know which of those facts was more annoying to him. After a few moments thought, his pride informed him that it was the former. 

When a harried looking footman approached asking why he was out of doors so inappropriately attired when his uncle expected him to be in the house to receive the Gardiners (clearly implied was the fact that he was mainly expected to meet the eldest daughter) forthwith, and he somehow found himself being forced into the most ludicrous costume including an absurd cravat, he amended his previous decision to favour the latter condition.

When he made it back to '69, and by God he would, he was going to murder that aristocratic little shit. 

It was only much later that it occurred to him to wonder how the footman knew who he was and seemed to think that he was the heir presumptive to the master of the house. 

Of course by then, the previous master of the house had died, leaving him master of the house, and he had met Jane Gardiner, fallen hopelessly in love with her in the way that gentlemen of the purer sciences tend to when faced with a pretty girl who was talking to them while smiling coquettishly, married the chit, and fathered three daughters. And it was rather too late.


End file.
